Abstract:

On March 11, 2011, eastern Japan was struck by a catastrophic earthquake. The east coast of the region also suffered severe damage, which not only destroyed the infrastructure but also damaged several educational assistance systems. In Kumamoto in 2017, a severe earthquake of seismic intensity 7 occurred twice on two consecutive days. This earthquake also caused extensive damage to all social infrastructure facilities and information systems.

In addition, Japan has encountered numerous unpleasant experiences that have occurred as sudden serious crises. For instance, in the first 10 days of July 2018, a special heavy-rain warning was issued in 10 prefectures in western Japan. Rainfall exceeded previous recorded measurements at many observation points in this region. Owing to heavy torrential rains and the landslides that occurred over an extensive area spanning about half the country, many infrastructure facilities were destroyed and power grids and communication networks were shut down. For this reason, many educational assistance systems could not be effectively operated.

Moreover, several other factors contribute to East Asia's unstable regional security. Several missile launching tests were conducted from the Korean Peninsula in 2017. If a missile lands in a metropolitan area, the resulting damage would be unimaginable. In this way, the threats that Japan should deal with have diversified. The frequencies of occurrence of such threats are also increasing. This situation is also applicable to the field of information systems and educational environment.

The current educational environment cannot be realized without educational assistance systems such as the Learning Management System. The learning and teaching histories of students are stored in the systems. The fact is that awareness of learning data such as learning and teaching histories is important in higher education. If the educational assistance systems with students' learning and teaching histories is lost as a result of a crisis, we consider the loss as equivalent to lost sustainability for educational activity. Therefore, we need to plan a mechanism to protect educational assistance systems and students' learning histories from various crises.

In this research, we built an adaptive risk management framework for e-Learning environments. The proposed framework controls the environment in which the educational assistance system will be executed depending on the type of crisis. The management strategy to combat crises differs depending on the type of crises. The strategy to combat natural disasters focuses on keeping educational assistance systems away from disaster sites. On the other hand, this framework adopts a strategy to transfer the system environment from the public cloud to the private cloud in times of regional security crises because, the system may be lost if the public cloud is destroyed by any kind of attack.

To effectively operate these controls, proposed management framework can get emergency warning alerts by smartphones via cell-phone carriers. Major Japanese cell-phone carriers send emergency warnings to the smartphones over which they have control in times of crises. This proposed framework adaptively changes the behavior of the educational assistance environment based on container-based virtualization according to the type of crisis. As a result, the organization can keep running e-Learning environments and without losing any learning history.

Keywords:

e-learning platform, multi cloud, crises risk reduction, crisis alerts.